the world of private banking

THE ROtHScHILD ARcHIVE 35
reflected in the work of scholars using the Rothschild agents’ letters in such places
as Spain, Hungary, Cuba and Mexico.
It is also important to grasp the fact that the London banking archive is as much
a history of the other sister banks – for at least part of their history – as it is of itself.
The most informative and best-preserved material is that received from those banks
– the in-letters – both private and general. Given the detail packed into the pages
of these letters on local markets, politics and society, they constitute by far the best
source anywhere for an understanding of the local positioning of the Rothschilds
and their banks and the level and type of access they had to local news.
Much more could be said about the range of business papers surviving from
NMR. I could talk of mining, bullion, sovereign loans and private clients. But this
task has already been well achieved by Simone Mace, a former archivist, in an
article in 1992 in Business Archives: Sources and History.
It is important to add to any description of The Rothschild Archive as it stands
an indication of the non-banking material which is included in the collection. I
have already drawn attention to the fact that business and personal affairs are often
inextricably mixed among the papers. But the vault of the family bank has, from
the earliest days, been recognized as an obvious repository for material arising
from personal activity and relating to the family’s history. Over recent years,
with a growing commitment by the Rothschild family to the development and
maintenance of the Archive in London as a centre for research in many aspects
of Rothschild history, this trend has increased and members of the family, both in
the UK and beyond, have chosen to place papers in the custody of the archivists
in London. Given the range of activities in which the family has been involved
across two centuries this predictably brings to our doors a diversity of researchers,
many of whom might not normally be expected to find their way into a bank
archive. Principal among them are art historians, who find, concealed among the
personal accounts and letters, many records of the acquisition of fine furniture and
Old Masters during the heyday of collecting; for example, from Baron Ferdinand,
whose collections now survive – in part at least – at Waddesdon Manor. Among
the family papers are the diaries – in German – of Charlotte, wife of Baron Lionel,
head of the Bank from 1836 to 1878, full of comments on social and political
events, and throwing much light on the key issues of the day, viewed from the
perspective of an intelligent and centrally placed observer – ideal hunting ground
for the social historian.
Two significant bodies of papers which have arrived are the so-called Laffitte
Papers – confusingly called, not after the rue Laffitte in Paris where de Rothschild
Frères’ offices were located, but after the château and vineyard where they were
later stored. These, deposited by a member of the French branch of the family,
contain miscellaneous but substantial files extending back in some cases to the
earliest decades of Baron James’ activity in Paris. Alongside papers relating to
S. Mace, ‘The Archives of the London Merchant Bank of N.M. Rothschild & Sons’,
in Business Archives: Sources and History, vol. 64, 1992, pp. 1–14.